We have been trying to migrate a customer from Windows 2003 SBS to Windows 2012 R2 Essentials, because of the looming End-of-Support deadline for Windows Server 2003 in July.
Everything appeared to run OK until it came time to demote the old SBS server using DCPromo in advance of removing it from the network totally. At that point it said that it could not find any other DC for the domain. Further investigation showed that this was because the NETLOGON and SYSVOL shares were not present on the new DC.
We checked that the two DCs could see each other and PING each other using their DNS names. We also disabled the firewalls on both servers temporarily, neither of which fixed the problem.
Looking in the File Replication Service Event Log on the new DC we found this error:
The File Replication Service has detected that the replica set "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)" is in JRNL_WRAP_ERROR. Replica set name is : "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)" Replica root path is : "\\?\c:\windows\sysvol\domain" Replica root volume is : "\\.\C:" A Replica set hits JRNL_WRAP_ERROR when the record that it is trying to read from the NTFS USN journal is not found. This can occur because of one of the following reasons. [1] Volume "\\.\C:" has been formatted. [2] The NTFS USN journal on volume "\\.\C:" has been deleted. [3] The NTFS USN journal on volume "\\.\C:" has been truncated. Chkdsk can truncate the journal if it finds corrupt entries at the end of the journal. [4] File Replication Service was not running on this computer for a long time. [5] File Replication Service could not keep up with the rate of Disk IO activity on "\\.\C:". Setting the "Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore" registry parameter to 1 will cause the following recovery steps to be taken to automatically recover from this error state. [1] At the first poll, which will occur in 5 minutes, this computer will be deleted from the replica set. If you do not want to wait 5 minutes, then run "net stop ntfrs" followed by "net start ntfrs" to restart the File Replication Service. [2] At the poll following the deletion this computer will be re-added to the replica set. The re-addition will trigger a full tree sync for the replica set. WARNING: During the recovery process data in the replica tree may be unavailable. You should reset the registry parameter described above to 0 to prevent automatic recovery from making the data unexpectedly unavailable if this error condition occurs again. To change this registry parameter, run regedit. Click on Start, Run and type regedit. Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Click down the key path: "System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtFrs\Parameters" Double click on the value name "Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore" and update the value.
So, we corrected that error by creating the specified DWORD value in the registry, but that still didn’t correct the error – we were now getting event 13508 “The File Replication Service is having trouble enabling replication”. We stopped/started the FRS service at both ends, but that didn’t resolve the problem.
Finally we checked the event log at the old DC, and that was showing the same “JRNL_WRAP_ERROR” as the new DC, so we created the registry entry on that PC and restarted the FRS service on both domain controllers, which fixed the problem after several minutes.
Looking back through the event viewer, this JRNL_WRAP_ERROR was present on the old 2003 SBS serve since at least late 2011, but because it was the single DC in the domain, it was not obvious there was a problem.